Michelle had already
killed 17 people as it blasted through Cuba, Honduras, Nicaragua and Jamaica.
With the Bahamas in its path, forecasters had to decide whether to believe the
satellite or the ham radio.

They chose the report from
the ham radio, scrapping plans to downgrade Michelle and keeping Hurricane
warnings for the Bahamas. Parts of the island grouping took a direct hit from
the storm.

"The surface winds from
the ham report really helped us immensely," said Mayfield, director of the
National Hurricane Center in Miami.

Despite sophisticated
technology that has made hurricane forecasting more accurate, ham radio
operators remain a critical component, sometimes providing more reliable
information than satellites and hurricane hunter aircraft to forecasters whose
job it is to track the storms and warn people out of harm's way.

During the Atlantic
hurricane season, radio operators in the United States, the Caribbean and Latin
America team up to provide data to forecasters. And when the power is out, ham
radio operators with battery power or electric generators are sometimes the only
source of information from a storm-stricken region.

"No matter what the
satellite says, no matter what the airplanes say, it's what's on the ground that
counts," said Ham operator John McHugh.

McHugh helps organize a
group of 40 ham volunteers in Miami who are activated yearly on June 1 for the
start of the Atlantic hurricane season.

When a storm is 300 miles
away from any land, they come in three-hour shifts to the center and field
reports from other dedicated amateur radio hounds on reserved long-range radio
frequencies. Ham operators transmit and receive valuable hurricane data such as
wind speeds, pressure and rain amounts.

The data bounces to Miami,
where it is digested by forecasters.

Surface information ahead
of a storm leads to the most accurate predictions for where a hurricane is going
and how strong it is. Ground data from ham radio operators reporting from the
middle of the storm can verify maximum winds and pressure readings. After a
hurricane, amateur radio provides damage reports and rain totals.

From his "fort-like" home
in St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, John Ellis has an elaborate setup
complete with transceivers, antennas and weather gauges he uses to measure
weather conditions and communicate with the hurricane center.

Ellis, 59, has been
through major hurricanes Hugo in 1989 and Georges in 1998, along with several
other hurricanes and tropical storms. He's been in amateur radio for 48 years,
starting off by helping civil defense officials track tornadoes in Johnson
County, Kansas.

Many ham operators, like
Ellis, can transmit when power and telephones don't work by using portable
electric generators. Ellis has antennas that can lie flat on the ground outside
- allowing him to transmit in the face of a hurricane's strong winds.

"The thrust is to give the
hurricane center as much notice as possible so they can get their warnings out
as accurately as possible," Ellis said in a telephone interview.

He and his wife have a set
routine he describes as automatic - put up shutters, gas up the car, bring in
the lawn furniture and ride out the storm. They can file reports with the
hurricane center or relay reports from other ham operators.

"The house is very
unpleasant when all the shutters go up," Ellis said. "It's dark and it's dreary
and not a fun place to be in. It's a fort."

Ellis said the arrival of
e-mail and the Internet in the 1990s has kept ham operators relevant to
hurricane forecasting. The World Wide Web and 24-hour cable news stations have
heightened the need for instant news, putting the onus on amateur radio for
real-time reports when the power is usually out.

"During those first few
hours, the ham radio is as important as it ever was, perhaps a little bit more
so because of the need for news and the expectation of knowing what's going on
right now," Ellis said.

The $20,000 setup at the
hurricane center includes not only radios but also computers and fax machines
that get data to forecasters. Most of the equipment is donated.

Hams are keeping up with
technology in several ways. An instant Internet-based method of reporting
hurricane data [ON-NHC] is being used by 200 to 300 people who don't own ham
radios but live within 50 miles of the U.S. coast, have working weather stations
in their homes and want to help the center's hurricane coverage.

They just fill out a form
and e-mail it to the volunteers at the center.

Another program [CWOP]
allows the National Weather Service to get instant year-round feeds from
hundreds of computers connected to home weather stations which automatically
communicate wind speed and direction, temperature and pressure every 15 minutes.

But it's during hurricane
season when hams and other reporters of weather data are most prized by Mayfield
and hurricane specialists.

"We're the ones who are
actually there, in the middle of it," Ellis said.